Our
focus is on the corporate rights treaties that are misleadingly sold as
trade agreements. In particular, the spotlight is on the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, negotiated in secret, and now scheduled to be
rubber-stamped by national governments on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
The TPP is best understood as a major milestone in the long-term war
waged by the corporate elite against any form of democracy. It gives
corporations the power to block any environmental protections or health
and safety legislation that could be interpreted as interfering with a
corporation’s ‘right’ to make a profit by doing whatever it wants. It
will significantly undermine efforts to fight climate change by giving
corporations the power to block laws that would prevent fracking,
tarsands extraction, coal mining, etc. Food safety protections are
similarly attacked: banning GMO crops or imports, or even required GMO
labelling, becomes a restraint of trade. Internet advocacy groups are
calling the TPP a ‘death warrant for the Open Internet” because, in the
name of ‘copyright protection’, it gives corporations the power to force
Internet Service Providers to take down websites, even in other
countries, that are allegedly infringing copyright.

As
always, people are fighting back and will continue to fight back. That
requires organizing: as an article by Al Giordano reminds us, “Nothing
is ever won without organizing.” Also in this issue, we remember Bhaskar
Save, a farmer in India who developed organic farming methods on his
own farm which have gained worldwide admiration.

The name of our topic of the week is more than a
little misleading, since so-called “trade agreements” have little to do
with trade. The very word “trade” is a misnomer when an ever-increasing
proportion of economic activity consists of intra-corporate transfers
within multinational corporations which have off-shored their production
to low-wage jurisdictions in many different countries. These “trade
agreements” are in fact best understood as corporate rights and investor
rights treaties whose purpose is to prevent governments from doing
anything that might inhibit corporate freedom of action or impact
corporate profits. Connexions features a selection of resources which
explore the real meaning of international trade agreements. Explore
them here

All Rights Reserved: Now We Know the Final TTP is Everything We Feared

The
Transatlantic and Transpacific Trade and Investment Partnerships have
nothing to do with free trade. “Free trade” is used as a disguise to
hide the power these agreements give to corporations to use law suits to
overturn sovereign laws of nations that regulate pollution, food
safety, GMOs, and minimum wages.Read more

On
issues ranging from climate change to food safety, from open Internet
to access to medicines, the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) is a
disaster. While the text is full of handouts to the fossil fuel
industry, it doesn’t mention the words climate change once. What it does
do, however, is give fossil fuel companies the extraordinary ability to
sue local governments that try and keep fossil fuels in the ground. If a
province puts a moratorium on fracking, corporations can sue; if a
community tries to stop a coal mine, corporations can overrule them. In
short, these rules undermine countries' ability to do what scientists
say is the single most important thing we can do to combat the climate
crisis: keep fossil fuels in the ground.Read more

The
Transatlantic and Transpacific Trade and Investment Partnerships have
nothing to do with free trade. “Free trade” is used as a disguise to
hide the power these agreements give to corporations to use law suits to
overturn sovereign laws of nations that regulate pollution, food
safety, GMOs, and minimum wages. Read more

Salvadorans
fighting against a Canadian mining multinational discuss how secretive
international tribunals allow corporations to override elected
governments and impose projects that threaten the environment and health
of local populations.Read more

Agroecology as a Tool for Liberation: Transforming Industrial Agribusiness in El Salvador

“We say that every
square meter of land that is worked with agro-ecology is a liberated
square meter. We see it as a tool to transform farmers' social and
economic conditions. We see it as a tool of liberation from the
unsustainable capitalist agricultural model that oppresses farmers.” Read more

All
organizing begins with the telling of a story. When we listen carefully
to somebody’s story, we learn what motivates him, what she is passionate
about. Listening is the first skill and duty of a community organizer.
Before we can get somebody to do something, we have to learn what he and
she want, which is usually different than what we presumed they wanted.Read More

The Passing of Bhaskar Save: What The ‘Green Revolution’ Did for India

Bhaskar Save farmed on 14 acres of land in Gujarat, India. Using
traditional methods, he demonstrated on his farm that yield is superior
to any farm using chemicals in terms of overall quantity, nutritional
quality, taste, biological diversity, ecological sustainability, water
conservation, energy efficiency and economic profitability. Save, who
emphasized self-reliance at the farm/village level was an inspiration
for generations of farmers. Bhaskar Save died on October 24 at the age
of 93.Read more

Featuring a selection of materials from the Nelson Mandela Archive, which is in the process of being digitized.Read more

Newly discovered Malcolm X tapes

The folks at the
Freedom Archives in San Francisco recently stumbled across a couple of
unmarked reels that turned out to contain Malcolm X speeches and
interviews. Ranging from his time as a Minister in the Nation of Islam
to a couple months before his death in February 1965, these reels offer a
wonderful opportunity to hear Malcolm at different points in his
political development.Read more

Economist
Michael Hudson exposes how finance, insurance, and real estate (the
FIRE sector) have seized control of the global economy. The FIRE sector
is responsible for today’s extreme economic polarization (the 1% vs. the
99%) via favored tax status that inflates real estate prices while
deflating the “real” economy of labour and production. Hudson shows in
vivid detail how the Great 2008 Bailout saved the banks but not the
economy, and plunged the U.S., Irish, Latvian and Greek economies into
debt deflation and austerity. Killing the Host describes how
the phenomenon of debt deflation imposes punishing austerity on the U.S.
and European economies, siphoning wealth and income upward to the
financial sector while impoverishing the middle class.Read more

Birdie,
who sleeps in trees and sells fruits and vegetables on the streets of
Rio de Janeiro, loves the two abandoned dogs he now lives with. In
Heloisa Passos’ film, Birdie reads the minds of his two best canine
friends. See

Your support is needed to keep Connexions going

All
of the work of the Connexions project is done by volunteers, but our
expenses include rent, phone and computer costs and technical support,
as well as expenses related to our ongoing project of converting printed
archival materials into digital formats. You can make a one time or
regular monthly contribution through the donate page on the Connexions website.

Bequests

Many of us have made working for
social justice a lifetime commitment. If you are thinking about leaving
a legacy for social justice that will live on, you might want to
consider leaving a bequest to Connexions in your will. If you'd like to
discuss this option, please contact us: Connexions Archive and Library,
812A Bloor Street West, Suite 201, Toronto, ON M6G 1L9, 416-964-5735 or
see the Bequest page..

Copyright
Connexions 2015. Contents are licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial License. This means you are welcome to share
and republish the contents of this newsletter as long as you credit
Connexions, and as long as you don’t charge for the content.